Thursday, March 22nd, 2007 - 7:30PM The Home of Lawrence Bender
Bel Air, CA
The Internet has created an unparalleled crisis for totalitarian and repressive regimes worldwide. While China can bully American search engine companies into censoring results, the U.S. gov’t is censoring left-wing news sources from troops in Iraq. But as with all technology there is a cat-and-mouse game using new tools and techniques to censor and subvert censorship: all made by U.S. companies. What responsibility does a U.S. company have in selling software to repress foreign citizens? Will new U.S. laws regarding China kill American access to the world’s largest economy? Join us as five of the world's foremost Internet experts examine the censorship issue and how it could affect our lives.
Jonathan Zittrain is the inaugural holder of Oxford’s Chair in Internet Governance and Regulation, and a principal of the Oxford Internet Institute (https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk). His research interests include battles for control of digital property and content, cryptography, electronic privacy, the roles of intermediaries within Internet architecture, and the useful and unobtrusive deployment of technology in education. He co-founded Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, (https://cyber.law.harvard.edu), where he is currently the Jack N. & Lillian R. Berkman Visiting Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies. He has recently co-authored a study of Internet filtering by national governments, and is writing a book about the future of the now-intertwined Internet and PC - and how to stop it. He is a justice of the peace and was the legal story consultant for NBC-TV’s prime time hit "Ed." He is also the co-founder of ChillingEffects.org, an authoritative and widely-reviewed website where Google and others report requests that information be censored.
Scott Moore is VP of Content Operations at Yahoo!. He was previously MSN's general manager of programming, where he managed editorial, design, and product development for MSN Channels, MSNBC.com, MSN Video, and MSN Autos, and was instrumental in developing MSN's video service. During that time, Moore also served as president of MSNBC.com and publisher of Slate.
Jeffrey O’Brien will be moderating the event. He is a senior editor at Wired magazine, where he edits and writes features. O'Brien handles much of the business coverage for Wired. His profile of cave-explorer Bill Stone, “To Hell and Back,” was included in The Best Science and Nature Writing 2005. O'Brien was recently awarded a Templeton-Cambridge fellowship and will be studying what he calls "the narcotic effect of religion" for two months at the University of Cambridge this summer.
Stephen Hsu is a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Oregon. Trained at Caltech (BS) and Berkeley (PhD), he held research and faculty positions at Harvard and Yale before moving to Oregon in 1998. Hsu is also a technologist, workng with encryption and Internet security technologies. In 2000, he co-founded SafeWeb, Inc., a software company developing applications in these areas. Funded by investors including In-Q-Tel, the CIA venture capital fund, as well as two of the largest U.S. hedge funds, SafeWeb's technologies were licensed for use by the CIA in internal applications, as well as by the U.S. Voice of Amerca agency to defeat foreign government censorship of the Internet. In 2001, SafeWeb servers delivered more than 2 billion encrypted documents over the Internet. Other agencies using SafeWeb technology include the World Health Organization, the U.S. Navy and leading corporations such as EMC and Google. They have been covered by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Business 2.0, Wired, Caltech News, and CNN among others. SafeWeb was acquired by Symantec in 2003 for $26 million. Hsu's latest startup, also in Internet security, is Robot Genius, Inc. (https://www.robotgenius.net).
Jason Calacanis is a blogger and Internet entrepreneur. Most recently, he co-founded Weblogs, Inc., an advertising-funded blogging business which was recently purchased by AOL for a rumored $20-40 million. During the hay-days of the Internet, Calacanis founded the Silicon Alley Reporter and Digital Coast Reporter magazines. The former grew from a photocopied newsletter to a 300-page glossy magazine with a staff of 70, and launched the careers of Clay Shirky, Tristan Louis, Rafat Ali of PaidContent.org, and Xeni Jardin. The magazine was later renamed Venture Reporter, and was sold to Dow Jones & Company. He was profiled in the New Yorker and Wired during the dotcom boom. The profile from the New Yorker was titled "the connector" and was the basis for Malcolm Gladwell's "connectors" described in the book The Tipping Point. Calacanis was featured on the cover of Forbes. He was profiled in Wired a second time for his work on commercializing blogging. He is known for being outspoken and moderately transparent about Weblogs, Inc., going so far as to give updates on the company's Google Adsense earnings. Time Warner's America Online agreed to buy Weblogs, Inc. in October 2005 for a rumored $20 to $40 million. He was a consultant on, and appeared in, The Center of the World, a film by Wayne Wang with Peter Saarsgard.
Personalized Dinner Menu. Complimentary Wine from St. Supery Vineyards. Valet Parking.